‘[Y]ou can’t help noticing America is extremely obese’

The decline of America’s human capital is not pretty. And, indeed, there is something sad about a crusade for individual liberty over the right to waddle down the street slurping sickly sweet children’s drinks out of giant plastic cups with oversized straws, as poignant an image of societal infantilization as anything.

Nevertheless, slurp free or die. No citizenry worth the name would be produced by a state that does not trust them to choose their own beverages — not even French peasants or Russian serfs.

But Giuliani was tough on crime, so much so that he made the city safe for a successor who was tough on Coke.

In the old days, the scrappy, feisty types like La Guardia and Koch wound up the subjects of rowdy Broadway musicals, Fiorello! and Mayor. In the absence of Hello, Bloomy! or Les Bloomerables, go see Mary Poppins at the New Amsterdam, and ponder that in New York’s nanny state Michael Poppins has ruled that no more than three spoonfuls of sugar are permitted to help the medicine go down.